Mobile network operators face multiple challenges in today’s hyperconnected world. These include enhancing the use of radio resources, simplifying network management and reducing total cost of ownership. To address these challenges, a self-optimizing network is one of the most valuable and promising technologies. Without the support of intelligent automation, the massive growth of mobile usage, compounded by multitechnology, multivendor wireless infrastructures, makes network management a convoluted task for any MNO. Anticipation of sustained network traffic growth, the proliferation of heterogeneous networks and the ongoing objective of reducing operating expenditures are top drivers for SON solutions.
New and emerging classes of mobile devices – smartphones, consumer devices with embedded wireless capabilities, machine-to-machine “smart” devices and anything associated with the “Internet of Things” – are fostering explosive growth in wireless data usage. As a result, MNOs must optimize their radio access networks to support a growing number of higher-bandwidth data applications and provide advanced services, while simultaneously ensuring they’re delivering the optimal user experience.
Cisco claims that global mobile data traffic was 1.5 exabytes per month in 2013 – the equivalent of 372 million DVDs each month or 4.1 billion text messages each second. Additionally, the global mobile data traffic that year was equivalent to 39 times the volume of global mobile traffic in 2008. This validates that mobile data consumption is growing, and will continue to grow, incessantly. However, monetizing this trend is an upward battle for service providers because wireless data revenue measured on a per-megabyte basis is decreasing.
While LTE wireless access technology was welcomed as a means to address this growing data capacity crunch, it also contributes to the problem. Always available and speedier access to mobile applications means more people are going wireless. At the same time, spectral efficiency gains are provided via new technologies, and provide some relief to network congestion and management. But although data throughput per-user is growing, revenue per-megabyte is dropping so rapidly that these gains are unable to help operators compensate for the lost revenue. Consequently, mobile operators are increasing their focus on operational cost reduction through the capabilities of SON, as well as to help them manage the deluge of network traffic.
The prevalence of multitechnology architectures – with 2G, 3G, LTE and Wi-Fi technologies operating in parallel – also pose significant operational and network complexity. HetNets place increasing demands on service providers’ networks and their operational staff as they are required to manage the complexity of overlaid and interrelated networks – a task that is virtually impossible to do manually. To ensure quality of experience, more complex quality of service and policy implementations are required, while at the same time increasing network throughput in response to the rapid growth in wireless data usage.
Rather than spending millions of dollars extending their networks (new sites, carriers, etc.), MNOs can save money and time by maximizing the capacity they already have. Mobility load balancing is the self-optimization feature of SON that shifts loads from capacity-restricted resources to cells with free capacity. MLB provides automatic modification of admission and congestion control parameters. This functionality allows MNOs to effectively grow and improve the reliability and capacity of their radio resources, while minimizing further infrastructure investments until it’s more cost-effective or unavoidable. By automating coverage and capacity allocation, the RAN becomes much more dynamic and efficient, helping to contain operating expenses by increasing network efficiency and contributing to revenue growth. SON is able to offer a more consistent, high-quality user experience through monitoring and automatically addressing the causes of network degradation. By identifying recurring network congestion and automatically applying solutions in a proactive manner, MNOs are able to limit performance degradation, prevent recurring network issues and enhance QoE through dynamic capacity allocation.
Zero-touch approach to network optimization
In traditional mobile infrastructures, network elements and associated parameters were manually configured. Planning, commissioning, configuration, integration and management of these parameters are essential for efficient and reliable network operation. However, the associated operation costs are significant. Specialized experts must be available to tune these network parameters, and the manual process is both time-consuming and prone to human error. In addition, manual tuning of a network inherently results in long delays in updating values in response to rapidly changing network topologies and operating conditions, resulting in suboptimal network performance.
SON minimizes the need for human intervention, and in so doing, delivers cost efficiency in network management. Automatic neighbor relation has been viewed as one of the primary drivers of SON deployments. Manually provisioning and managing neighboring cells in traditional mobile networks is a challenging and time-consuming task, and it becomes more difficult as new cells and mobile technologies are added to the current infrastructure. ANR is the self-configuration capability of SON that relieves operators of the burden of manually managing neighbor relations. ANR provides neighbor management for inter-frequency, intra-frequency and inter-radio access technology neighbor relationships, as well as for adjusting neighbor priorities. Using software algorithms, automatic neighbor relations may be added, removed or reprioritized based on operator control policies, thereby removing the opportunity for human error. By removing the need for engineers to be deployed to a site to provision and configure cells, it is possible to achieve the supplementary opex savings that operators want.
Automation is not a new concept in network management. Service provider networks already depend on the extensive use of automated processes; for instance, in the area of radio resource management (scheduling, power and rate control, etc.), which demonstrates that automated features perform well. The appearance of SON represents a continuation of the natural evolution of wireless networks, in which automated processes are simply extending their scope deeper into the network. There are other varying drivers compelling operators to reach a truly zero-touch network but the common denominator is the benefits offered by SON capabilities. These include increased network performance, a better end-user experience and an increase in network capacity and network quality. For the bottom line though, it’s also reduced operational expenditures and preventable investments in network upgrades.
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